Symantec seeks NZ joint venture partner

Symantec is looking at the potential of joint venturing with New Zealand resellers in an effort to help them with the transition to cloud and managed services, and maximise the benefits of ultra fast broadband.

Sean Kopelke, Symantec director strategic solutions, Pacific, says the company is in the very early stages of identifying potential companies to partner with and help build the infrastructure required to offer services such as hosted storage and back-up.

The plan will first be put in place in Australia, where Kopelke says Symantec has identified partners to work with, before being rolled out to New Zealand. “We’re nowhere down the track to having anything exciting in place yet,” he adds.

“While the short term view would be to sell the technology, longer term we need to be smart, so what we’re saying is let’s jointly share the profit and the cost.”

The plan would see Symantec partnering with systems integrators to build the infrastructure, with Symantec contributing some up-front costs in return for a share of the profits.

“Managed services, if done right are a fantastic opportunity for the channel,” Kopelke says.

The plan comes as both Australia and New Zealand step up roll outs of ultra fast broadband. “There is massive opportunity for the channel to build services for SMBs off that,” Kopelke says.

He says Symantec will also be bringing its backup appliance business and its managed security services to New Zealand in the near future.

“We’ve brought our Backup Exec software based business into an appliance, where you can not break it,” he says. “We think there is an outstanding market opportunity here in New Zealand because of the healthy SMB space.”